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Published: Sep 16, 2005 01:41 PM
Sat - August 23, 2003
"Extreme Programming: When two heads are better than one
Two engineers walk into a bar. The
bartender serves them one glass, one block of ice, and one bottle of vino. How
does the evening end?
In
one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons, the pointy-haired boss announces that he's
learned in a new company management course about the importance of getting
closer to his employees. "I'm just going to stand here and observe your work,"
he tells the hapless hero. But this passive approach lasts scarcely a second.
By the next panel, he is shouting, "Move that mouse! Now click it! Click
it!!!" as a frowning Dilbert thinks, "This has long day written all over
it."
I remembered that cartoon when I first heard about "extreme programming"—the management practice in which companies pair two programmers with one monitor, one keyboard, and one software assignment. The goal is to accelerate development cycles by letting the engineers brainstorm ideas and edit each others' code.
"It will never work," I thought. "One of the programmers will kill the other before the first library compiles."
Well, lucky for that second fellow, it appears that I was wrong.
According to this article in Wired magazine, extreme programming not only works, it can work better than solo efforts. Together extreme programming partners catch more bugs than either one of them could alone, reducing an eight hour debugging session to as little as half an hour in some cases. And the coders claim they have more fun, produce better programs, and feel more confident about the results.
Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions given that writers, think tanks, and improvisational comedians have teemed up for years. But I really believed that coders' natural introversion and programming's rigid logical requirements would both interfere with the development process.
Who knew?
I remembered that cartoon when I first heard about "extreme programming"—the management practice in which companies pair two programmers with one monitor, one keyboard, and one software assignment. The goal is to accelerate development cycles by letting the engineers brainstorm ideas and edit each others' code.
"It will never work," I thought. "One of the programmers will kill the other before the first library compiles."
Well, lucky for that second fellow, it appears that I was wrong.
According to this article in Wired magazine, extreme programming not only works, it can work better than solo efforts. Together extreme programming partners catch more bugs than either one of them could alone, reducing an eight hour debugging session to as little as half an hour in some cases. And the coders claim they have more fun, produce better programs, and feel more confident about the results.
Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions given that writers, think tanks, and improvisational comedians have teemed up for years. But I really believed that coders' natural introversion and programming's rigid logical requirements would both interfere with the development process.
Who knew?